A wide variety of products pass through commerce in the form of shipments between manufacturers and distributors and between distributors and retailers. The majority of such products are shipped in an appropriately constructed shipping container. The shipping container for many products comprises a closed carton formed of a corrugated paper or cardboard material. While many different types of carton materials are utilized, the majority comprise multiple layers of heavy paper having an interposed corrugated layer secured to the surrounding layers by an adhesive to form a relatively ridged, strong and lightweight shipping material generally referred to as corrugated cardboard. While the construction of such shipping cartons vary substantially with the character of the product shipped, in general, most shipping cartons comprise an outer box portion having an openable or removable top portion for gaining access to the shipping carton interior. In many constructions the top or lid portion is integral to the remainder of the carton. In the event a product such as pharmaceutical material is shipped within such cartons, a plurality of interior segments or cells are formed within the carton interior to provide separate cells for each of the units of pharmaceutical products. Most commonly, such multiple cells are formed by an additional unit comprising a lattice arrangement of cardboard separations which is configured to be received within the carton interior.
Because the majority of products, such as pharmaceutical products, are subject to multiple successive shipments in their transfer from the manufacturer to one or more distributors and from there to the retailers, a problem arises as the individual orders become smaller and smaller. For example, the manufacturer of a pharmaceutical product may ship a substantial number of pharmaceutical units to a distributor and the distributor will divide the total shipment between a number of retail customers. Thus, the situation arises in which the original shipping container used by the manufacturer in transferring the product to the distributor is not appropriate in size for the shipments of the distributor to the retailer. In most instances, it has been found necessary to repack the shipments received by the distributor from the manufacturer into other shipping containers or cartons for multiple shipments to the retailer. This repacking operation is, of course, time consuming and costly and subjects the phramaceutical product to additional risk of damage or breakage.
In addition to the problems associated with repackaging of the pharmaceutical product in the distribution chain, the packages themselves are generally expensive to manufacture. The typical shipping container having the multicelled structure described above is formed of multiple parts of corrugated cardboard material cut in particular shapes and sizes and impressed with multiple folds. The assembly of the packaging structure is completed by gluing the several parts together in what is a generally expensive manufacturing process.
While the present shipping containers provide some level of function and use in shipping products in multicelled containers, there remains a need in the art for a shipping carton which is formed of a single piece of material, assembled without the use of adhesives, and which is easily divisible into smaller shipping cartons while maintaining the integrity of the shipping carton and protection of the product.